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In every room, encircled by a name–
less Southern boy from Yale,
ROBERT BOYERS
There was my younger sister singing a Fellini theme
And making phone calls
While the r.est of us kept moving her discarded boots
Or sat and drank. Outside, in twenty-
nine degrees, a stray cat
Grazed in ·our driveway,
Seeking waste. It scratched the pail.
There were no other sounds.
Yet on and on the preparation of that vast consoling meal
Edged toward the stove. My mother
Had the skewers in her hands.
I watched her tucking skin
As though she missed her young, while bits of onion
Misted snow over the pronged death.
The echoes abound
in
this poetry. But echoes in the work of a
young poet need not always be wholly assimilated if the poet is to
ach·eve a voice of his own. A poem like "Grandmother In The Garden"
is no less lovely and moving for the fact that it calls to mind a number
of Jarrell's better poems, including one like "Next Day" from his final
volume. Here is Miss Gluck's poem:
The grass below the willow
Of my daughters wash is curled
With earthworms, and the world
Is measured into row on row
Of unspiced houses, painted to seem Mal.
The drugged Long Island summer sun drains
Pattern from those .empty sleeves, beyond my grandson
Squealing in his pen. I have survived my life.
The yellow daylight lines the oak leaf
And the wire vines melt with the unchanged changes
Of the baby. My children have their husbands' hands.
My husband's framed, propped bald as a baby on their pianos,
My tremendous man. I close my eyes. And all the clothes
I have thrown out come back to me, the hollows
Of my daughter's slips .
..
they drift; I see the sheer
Summer cott,ons drift, equivalent to air.
The poise and serenity of this poem constitute a remarkable tribute to
a poet so young, and the dense aural patterns are woven so casually
that one cannot but wonder at this poet's mastery of her craft.
Miss Gluck is a poet of few themes, but these she develops
with
a
ferocity that borders on obsession. She appears to write best when she
is least herself, when she writes out of contexts which are relatively
